Many business corporations, fast food restaurants and the like, see the big business potential in giving specialty-manufactured gifts to customers and prospective customers in an effort to generate more business. These gifts are generally inexpensive items, such as business cards, pencils, calendars, clocks, and calculators. These items have been customized to carry company logos, addresses, telephone numbers and similar materials, and these customized details then become more accessible to potential customers, to promote commercial activity.
Business corporations may take such specialty-manufactured gifts one step further by printing their telephone number on a refrigerator magnet-type hanging device and then commercially distributing their own refrigerator magnet to clients. Such magnet-type hanging devices are useful for hanging various types of notes, bills, telephone numbers etc. on a refrigerator door for easy viewing and organizing household or any other information.
Several approaches known in the art are provided for producing portable telephone number dialer devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,963,637 to Arzoumanian discloses a dedicated telephone dialer capable of automatically dialing a preprogrammed calling card abbreviated telephone number at one speed, waiting for a short period and then dialing a preprogrammed access number and, optionally, a preprogrammed personal identification number (PIN) at a slower speed. This dialer comprises electrical circuitry for generating DTMF tones, logic for dialing the requisite numbers, and a switch for initiating the tones comprising the dialing sequence or sequences. For activating and initiating the telephone call, the telephone dialer must be held up to the microphone of an off-hook telephone handset so that the first digit of the access number is dialed from the telephone keypad.
However, this prior art telephone dialer does not automatically initiate the telephone call. To do so, the user is required to dial the first digit of the access number from the telephone keypad in order to activate a switch and initiate the telephone call.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,357,566 to Dowling et al discloses an object-oriented programmable dedicated dialer device. The device includes a hollow disc-shaped body having a housing and defining an interior cavity, a telephone number dialing mechanism disposed in the interior cavity, a sound-generating transducer, and a touch sensor mounted to the housing and connected to the telephone number dialing mechanism. A micro-controller is provided for storing a telephone number in its memory. The touch sensor is operable in response to contact with a user to activate the dialing mechanism to dial the stored telephone number. When activated, the dialing mechanism begins operation to generate the plurality of DTMF tones necessary to dial the stored telephone number. The touch sensor and a graphic or logo of the organization, whose telephone number is stored in the micro-controller, are both mounted on the exterior of the front cover of the housing.
However, this prior art dialer device requires the user to initiate the telephone call, since the device operates only in response to a user touching the touch sensor. According to this device, the user must touch a touch sensor in order to activate the dialing mechanism with respect to the relevant telephone number and initiate the telephone call.
Furthermore, the electrical circuitry in all prior art approaches generates DTMF tones for initiating the telephone call and these designs are relatively expensive to produce.
Prior art telephone dialers based on tone sequences are not designed to operate with cellular phones.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a magnet dialer for use with standard and cellular phones, for automatically initiating a telephone call and providing a dialing sequence, without requiring the user to initiate the telephone call.